Australian rugby is coming for you and your children — or at least those kids whose schedules are not already filled by the sports that began raiding schoolyards and playgrounds years ago.

The Get into Rugby Club program is intended to attract more participants to both 15-a-side and sevens rugby, which has traditionally depended heavily on private school networks to pad its playing ranks.

So does the gift pack include a mini cravat in club colours? A reversible Super Rugby jersey that allows you to wear the winners' colours regardless of the result? A "my first stock market portfolio"?

Yes, yes, we are perpetuating the hoary stereotypes of privilege and bandwagon jumping, which rightly irritate those diehards from all walks of life who have enjoyed the game's on-field evolution and revel in its international cache.

But Australian rugby's unerring descent since the 2003 World Cup from genuine rival to the AFL and NRL to virtual second-tier sport not only invites but virtually demands a scathing assessment of its failure to break out of its core constituency and create a broader and younger following.

If you don't know about Rugby Australia's (RA) failings, you haven't read the column radio host and former Wallabies coach Alan Jones has published — again and again and again — in The Australian, kicking the game's leaders as if they were climate-change-believing, bicycle-riding, Turnbull-related, coal seam gas advocates.

But if Jones's attacks on RA headquarters can border on the hysterical, the belated attempt to win the hearts and minds of potential players exposes the opportunities lost by the sport's successive administrations as much as it highlights the efforts to catch up.

You only had to take a cursory glance around the Australian sporting landscape in the past week to see the lengths to which other sports have already gone to win the intense competition for potential participants and "consumers".

Even if the booming bats and even louder noises created by stadium DJs at BBL matches leave you with a throbbing headache, the increase in the number of kids playing entry-level and early-age junior cricket over the past few years is unarguable.

The AFL has taken the idea of promotion over content to another level with Friday night's AFLX, a concept that depends almost entirely on gimmicks and "activations" to create the perception a glorified training drill is a real sport.

Such is AFLX's desperation to be "down with the kids", it has seen the BBL's coin-flip-replacing bat flip and raised it a rock-paper-scissors contest.

But while we press box curmudgeons frown at this festival of frippery, there will be plenty of boys and girls emulating the feats of the AFLX "super heroes" at over-subscribed AFL Auskick clinics this season.

Meanwhile, football enjoys the vast participation appeal of its multinational, easy-to-play, relatively low-risk format; basketball courts are full to overflowing partly due to the NBA boom; and rugby league's junior appeal defies constant reputational damage, at least in its strongholds.

Rugby has competed strongly in female participation through the Olympic champion rugby sevens team, although this hasn't changed the perception the game is both late to the kids' party and hamstrung by historical failings.

Most obviously there is the lucrative pay-per-view TV deal that funded Super Rugby but simultaneously retarded growth in Australia where lack of free-to-air exposure left it is as merely a niche competition compared with the vast number of TV eyeballs trained to its major rivals.

Australian rugby struggling for visibility

For all the noise it made, the start of the Super Rugby season might have been played in a forest. At least outside its core constituency or in markets such as Perth, which RA came, saw, nearly conquered and then abandoned.

This leaves an even greater dependence on the fortunes of the Wallabies to create visibility, a cumbersome burden for a team that has not won a World Cup since 1999 or a Bledisloe Cup series since 2002.

Without team success, rugby has consequently had an increasingly greater promotional dependence on individual stars — be they home-grown, semi-imported or, like the current poster boy Israel Folau, pinched from rugby league.

Rugby's star system came under scrutiny recently when Fairfax rugby writer and Offsiders panellist Georgina Robinson revealed high-profile players were being paid partly through the Australian Rugby Foundation (ARF), which allowed businesses to make private tax refundable contributions to player salaries.

RA robustly defended this practice, which it claimed was commonplace across Australian sport, although the ARF payments are markedly different than the NRL's third-party agreements, which are (at least notionally) transparent promotional deals that don't raise questions about unseen access and influence.

Either way, the revelation did nothing to debunk the notion that rugby remains a game dependent upon private patronage and big-end-of-town benefactors to prop up its business rather than revenue derived from its universal appeal.

So, allowing for the game's other now ingrained problems, broadening the participation base with a well-orchestrated campaign aimed at getting more people to play, love and watch rugby seems a sensible response.

Yet with BBL giving way to the AFL and NRL preseasons and kids flocking to football pitches and basketball courts, you can't help wonder why this didn't occur to someone at RA 15 years ago."

]]>Rugbyblueandblackhttps://twf.com.au/showthread.php?t=40581The most deluded claptrap I have read since Wayne Smith’s articlehttps://twf.com.au/showthread.php?t=40580&goto=newpost
Thu, 21 Feb 2019 14:06:22 GMTCourtesy of some newbie on The Roar.
https://www.theroar.com.au/2019/02/21/rugby-supporters-can-we-please-change-tone/
Telling people to change the tone in the words of Tui ‘Yeah Right.’
You can’t talk positively from the sake of positivity when:
- There is still no plan from the RA in...

You can’t talk positively from the sake of positivity when:
- There is still no plan from the RA in terms of WA Rugby
- Teflon Beale’s videos and his umpteenth apology to his employers
- Uncle Cam is still Chair. Alan Jones in his latest article said that the knives are out for him which goes against Smith’s article. Jones is far more connected and doesn’t have his keys to the inner sanctum as a journalist to lose. Growden said nothing in his but chose to publish the Wallabies’ code of conduct which is broken but beaten out of the coach after it is leaked when a player is mysteriously ‘rested’
- The Rebels still haven’t produced any financials despite now being owned by the VRU
- The Rebels signing a major sponsor that is being wound up and the Thai Airways deal which got very little scrutiny despite being a rival to Qantas
- There is a club led clarion call against the RA
- The Wallabies lost nine tests in a calendar year
- Cheika stabs Larkham in front of the board and has a DoR along with a selector put on his head
- Uncle Cam runs a 45 second statement saying process at least four times and it will be done by Christmas. The process took until late February to complete with compensation paid to the Scottish Rugby Union
- The new selector says what Larkham put in his statement that it ultimately resides with the coach
- Third parties using the ARF to fund player payments tax free year as long as they as they abide by their political ideologies
- Trainwreck is still defending this behaviour verbatim

]]>RugbyBakkieshttps://twf.com.au/showthread.php?t=40580Any players want to come to the NThttps://twf.com.au/showthread.php?t=40567&goto=newpost
Wed, 13 Feb 2019 02:23:47 GMTJust speaking to the head coach of the NT Mosquitoes - he said there is some openings in particular for props for the Season that ends in May . PM me for details. ( They have games this year v Singapore and possibly trips to other Asian sides.
They are keen as up here to GRR to start.

Just speaking to the head coach of the NT Mosquitoes - he said there is some openings in particular for props for the Season that ends in May . PM me for details. ( They have games this year v Singapore and possibly trips to other Asian sides.